Enterprise mobility, poses many challenges for organisations today. Many of these are distributed across various user profiles, architectural patterns, data consumption scenarios etc. and the stories become more complex as we go deep. But if you try to understand its simply boils to six main challenges, which could be resolved by a strong platform and a evolving strategy.
Lets discuss about the main challenges and see how SAP Mobile Platform (SMP) is helping there....
- Any Data Access. (Interoperability & Open Standards)
- Any Backend Access (Openness & Flexibility)
- Any Device (All supported device platforms)
- Any User (From a novice user to an expert or Administrator or Developer)
- Any Time (Seamless Online - Offline behaviour)
- Any Application (Native, Web, Hybrid)
Answer is OData (www.odata.org). OData is document centric RESTful web protocol & the first class citizen of SAP Mobile Platform. SAP Mobile Plaform supports OData Channel as the core technology to provide interoperability with openness and standard based access options to backend systems.
OData today has a broad industry support and is much easier to provide integration of multiple client channels with the backend services.
Using OData gives you the benefit of openness to enable collaboration with multiple backends, some of them being legacy with custom integration points. Using SMP with Netweaver Gateway gives you access to all SAP systems through OData Channel. Meanwhile for other third party or legacy backend systems there are multiple options to connect and expose services for consumption thru SAP Mobile Platform. Exposing mobility on cloud is a strong option to connect to various cloud & on-premise services.
Support for all major device platforms vis-a-vis Apple, Android, Blackberry, Windows 8 etc. SAP Mobile Platform has everything rolling already.
Developers can build there custom clients, applications from ground zero with the open standards.
TCO considerations are a top priority. So when it comes to users which can be an end user to an IT administrator or an applications developer, SMP provides considerable improvements with respect to usability of admin portal, SDK Apis and end user experience.
Administrators want to control the costs, manage applications & devices centrally in the most convenient manner. End user want an experience of angry birds & the robust ness/flexibility of a desktop application on the device. And for the techies, the developer wants TCD & learning curve to be minimal, utilise existing skills and provide a great application with a simple, strong, secure & understandable code base.
With a unique mix of online and offline capabilities SMP SDKs provide options to build applications for all archetypes with ease. The presence of offline capabilities allows applications to be usable with complete ease even at times of bad connectivity or other issues.
Data is maintained safe and secure, accessible and fully manageable for the interested custom developers. Otherwise high amount of automations to maintain the different aspects of seamless online- offline design are available.
Customers want to try all flavors of application arche types possible today and choose the best that suits there requirements. The notion of build once deploy anywhere to notion of high end user experience to notion of mission critical/intensive to notion of web based etc, are the main drivers behind the decision of what sort of application it would be.
Options are a class of native applications built exclusively for each platform like IOS, Android vs the web/browser based applications. Then to bridge the gap there comes the hybrid approach like Cordova where you get best from the both the worlds. User experience is also a big driver here where you have the rich Native vs HTML 5 experience and developer choice of the build once deploy anywhere approach satisfied by Hybrid apps.
All this and many more questions are successfully handled by SAP Mobile Platform for native & hybrid space with effective development through its SDKs.
Check this link for more about SAP Mobile Platform
